You buy on eBay? Well, they are hiding the feedback some more !!!

Notice the 100% Feedback Rating. And the 75% feedback as seller, nicely hidden in the details. (Click to view full size)

Okay, eBay is still used for some purchases and sales… But, it keeps getting dicier and dicier.

Aside from the fees and other expenses… The feedback used to mean something.

A seller used to be able to control to whom they sold.

A buyer, or seller were able to leave feedback, including bad feedback, easily. It is almost impossible to leave bad feedback on eBay these days.

So, this means less about the value of good feedback. The 100% positive feedback here it turns out is quite a bit less.

How much less?

Ever look at the feedback details on Amazon? First of all, if you buy stuff on Amazon, how often you leave feedback? Not often right? So, someone with like 5 positive feedback has probably sold like 50 items… No feedback for buying. Amazon handles all the buyer side hassles…

And, if you wanna leave negative feedback, dang, you gotta really be unhappy to do that, cause it stings bad. So, someone with good feedback on Amazon is usually very easy to count on as a stellar seller.

Not so easy with eBay. As you can see here, “100% Positive feedback”…

Click on the first image in this post to see the details on the feedback for seller ‘ugly_inks’ of eBay fame…

As you can see, the 100% feedback is now only 100% in the last 12 months…

The seller feedback and the real total feedback numbers are not provided on the item description page, is 75% only and about 98% respectively. And, it’s very hard to leave negative feedback these days… So, figure lots of unhappies you may not know about.

This “100% Positive feedback” rating by eBay is very like someone asking you if ever you stole money, and you say no, I’m 100% not a money steeler…

Then when we dig deeper, if we dig deeper, we find out you haven’t stolen any money in the last 12 seconds… and when we dig deeper, we find you stole 1 in 4 dollars you were privileged to handle in the prior 12 minutes. This is a pretty good job of obviously hiding the truth eBay is working hard to hide.

We shouldn’t have to look so hard behind what they mean when they say “100% Positive feedback.”

Amazon’s feedback is very useful. They are thinking of changing it… I hope they do not. The proposed changes will make it much less transparent. Right now, someone with 100% feedback on Amazon and a few positive sales is reliable. If Amazon makes the changes, someone with 80% positive may be poor, and 90% positive may be poor…